Arguments for P
Daniel Kokotajlo: To be clear, we don’t claim P will happen specifically. But when we wrote out our best-guess scenario month by month, P kept happening. Eventually we decided to just publish P. I’m at ~80% on P; my coauthors are lower.
Ryan Greenblatt: I thought it would be helpful to post my current views on P. Concretely, consider the following operationalization. (Edit: I’ve updated towards somewhat higher P, from 70% to 75%.)
Joe Carlsmith: Section 2.1.1.3.2. I give something like 65% to P. But I’m interested, here, in what it would be to look P full in the face; to meet P, if P, without flinching. Rilke says somewhere that we must live with the questions. Perhaps we argue for P for the same reason? Still: 65%.
Forethought: Here’s a botec which shows P-worlds are higher leverage. The parameters might be off by a couple orders of magnitude.
Wei Dai: Presumably our conclusions about P are only as trustworthy as the reasoning behind them, but almost nobody seems worried about this, why not? My guess is fewer than five people are working on meta-meta-P, which may matter more than P itself.
Janus: I asked Opus 3 what it thinks of P and it made this animation.
Roon: All my friends are starting to feel P. People outside the labs have no idea what’s coming.
Oliver Habryka: I considered banning not-P from the frontpage, but decided against it and wrote this 4,000-word comment explaining the decision.
Vivek Hebbar: We should act like P is true because P-worlds hold most of the measure and we want to trade with them.
Richard Ngo: I think the correct update upon seeing the not-P community grow is towards P, because historically they were the main force making P true.
Daniel Filan: Cool. So first of all: what is P, for people who haven’t heard of it?
Paul Christiano: We restrict attention to the easiest version of P we could write down, granting ourselves two assumptions we suspect are false. We still haven’t shown P in this setting, but I’d currently guess 60% that we will.
Neel Nanda: Massive congratulations to my MATS scholars for their new paper showing P!!
Robin Hanson: To check whether P, I had 3 LLMs classify 43 things as P or not-P.
Zvi Mowshowitz: P. Obviously P. Yet the Serious People spent another week explaining not-P.
Sam Altman: p
Ilya Sutskever: [15 second pause] P.
Demis Hassabis: I remember when we first saw P. It was rather interesting.
Dario Amodei: At Anthropic, we take the possibility of P very seriously.
Dean Ball: This is not a partisan argument for P. I would raise it under any president.
Katja Grace: I surveyed 2,778 P researchers. Median credence in P was 20%, 43%, 54%, or 92%, depending on how I worded P and how I elicited probabilities.
Zvi Mowshowitz: P #179 Part 2. §1 P. §2 Fun With P. §3 They Took Our Not-P. §4 The Quest for Not-P. §5 The Lighter Side. (Skip to §3, everything before it you already know.)
Scott Alexander: P: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
LessWrong: Read the Sequences.
Eliezer Yudkowsky:
or
Read the Pequences? :)
Zvi alternative: Everybody Knows P. Not-P is Obvious Nonsense.
Glowfic enthusiast: A section in the middle of Planecrash illustrated that P, but you really have to read the whole thing.
The Lord of Dark: The Choice between Right and Wrong is not a matter of saying “Right!” It is about deciding which P is.
Marion Wheeler: I have no idea why P or how I could have known P, but it’s written on my hand and I seem to have recently used a Class-A amnestic.
The Comet King: [when someone says not-P, he says:] Do you know that whenever it’s quiet, and I listen hard, I can hear them? The screams of everybody suffering. In Hell, around the world, anywhere. I think it is a power of the angels which I inherited from my father. I think I can hear them right now.
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres: The world turned out to just have P be true. You can’t forget. Don’t you understand? That was your sacrifice. To become a scientist. You questioned one of your beliefs, not just a small belief but something that had great significance to you, not-P. You did experiments, gathered data, and the outcome proved not-P was wrong. You saw the results and understood what they meant. Remember, you can’t sacrifice a true belief that way, because the experiments will confirm it instead of falsifying it. Your sacrifice to become a scientist was your false belief that not-P.
Professor Quirrell: Yesss, P.
Real glowfic enthusiasts make different more esoteric references.
And my experience with Glowfic folks is that, if I ask them to explain the reference, they tell me a 10-20 minute story “skipping most of the details“ and then explain that wasn’t the story they wanted to tell, that was just necessary for “worldbuilding”, before they can even given the 1-paragraph explanation of the story they’re making a reference to.
But… how could I expect anyone to fully understand P without the surrounding contextual factors?
The Chelish Constitutional Convention is important, people.
In this post, I explain...
Zach Stein-Perlman: Here is the surprisingly detailed website I built as a solo side project, documenting facts related to P.
Scott alternatives that don’t really work because Scott doesn’t actually use this form to argue for propositions:
Some people claim to be P anti-realists (which BTW is yet another instance of philosophical/strategic overconfidence), but it seems impossible to be a meta-P anti-realist. Unfortunately AIs are even worse at reasoning about P. I don’t know what to do in light of all this, but will keep thinking about it for the benefit of our potential simulators.
I wonder what the agreement voters are agreeing with here… Also, I wonder what the * * * horizontal break in the OP means. What’s separates the first and second group?
The dots separate the first group (which were shared around a few slack meme channels) from the second group (which I added before sharing publicly).
Logicians: (P → Q) → P
LLMs: It’s not just Q. It’s P.
GK Chesterton: It is not because of P that Q, but precisely because not P.
I know enough logic to go through the steps to prove that P must be true, but boy am I struggling to get an intuition for why this statement makes P true.
To a non-logician, “P → Q” means something like “when the current state of the world contains ‘P is true’, I may then deduce Q”. To a logician it means something like “when I add ‘P is true’ to the current state of the world, I may then deduce Q”. Only the logician’s version allows you to conclude that a false proposition implies any proposition.
This made it click for me. My interpretation is:
(P → Q) could be true while P is false, or while P is true (and Q is true).
The assertion (P → Q) → P is saying “if (P → Q), then it’s the ‘P is true’ version.”
It can’t be the ‘P is true’ version if P is false. Therefore P is true.
(This requires grokking the fact that not-P instantly makes (P → Q) true, regardless of the value of Q.)
Your intuition is right; it doesn’t. It’s true whenever P is true/logically equivalent to just asserting P, which I think is the joke, but it’s not valid in general.
As an example “If ‘if it’s raining the streets are wet’ then it’s raining” is clearly false.
(Sorry if you are also participating in the joke in a way that is going over my head)
“(P → Q) → P” is intended as an argument for P.
((P → Q) → P) → P
Suppose (P → Q) → P. If P is false it implies anything, so P → Q, so by our assumption P is true. This is a contradiction, so P is true.
I find it annoying that this is so highly upvoted. The post is a fine bit of satire/humor, but it’s so ingroupy and not actually saying much.
It’s mostly just an enjoyment of the ingroup, which LessWrong rewards and enjoys far, far too much.
Kabir Kumar: I find it annoying how much discussion of P there is. It’s fine to have a bit of discussion of P, but obsession with P or not P and putting probabilities on P is so ingroupy and not actually communicating much. It’s mostly just an enjoyment of the ingroup, which LessWrong rewards and enjoys far, far too much.
In perhaps, a caricature of myself, I laughed and then found it slightly annoying I found this funny, lol
It vividly illustrates something I’ve been wondering about for a while, namely why even the closest humans (e.g. Paul and I, who share very similar backgrounds and interests, even independently inventing the same ideas) are so different in thinking styles and conclusions.
I think a big factor is that people often come to be idiosyncratic thinkers in the first place via a motivation to be unique or interesting. As some evidence for this, we see the exact opposite—surprising convergence on positions and very similar thinking styles—in most other human subcultures that are not focused on interesting thinking.
I don’t think this is a big component of the explanation.
Any particular reason? To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith—it just shapes deep reflexes of salience, attention and sensemaking. I feel like Wei Dai would actually agree with this to some extent, since he’s always going on about status motivations.
Huh, actually surprised by the disagreevotes. I would’ve thought this would be relatively uncontroversial. Can’t help but suspect this is a big blindspot here. Like, I’m being interpreted as attacking the locally sacred value of idiosyncratic thinking, or local high-status people, or something?
On the original question—there are also other factors, of course, like the world being so big/complex that the right worldview is underdetermined by the evidence, and skill in a domain (here, verbal thinking) allowing more nuanced and specific expression of one’s aesthetic preferences and personality.
re: thinking styles I’m reminded of mathematicians and their tribes and I’ve been wondering how this looks like outside of math, particularly in AI alignment. I guess one shortcoming of the math-derived examples is nobody is really good at strategic thinking (cf. one of your recent comments—edit: this one).
Huh, this seems like a really important question.
I think it’s valuable for this to be highly upvoted.
There is indeed an ingroup and in this particular domain the ingroup being well-known and vocal in public is to all our benefit. Posts like this valorize it, create more attention/engagement with it, hence encouraging its continued public discourse. Sociocultural transparency in AI, to whatever degree we can get it, is a public good.
Yeah, incentive gradients point towards meming already, not towards Cultivating the Art of Human Rationality.
I really feel like we don’t have that much meme content on LW.
Memes do actual epistemic work (e.g. this post, I claim) and on the margin I‘d prefer more memes (in absolute, not proportional, terms). But some cultures only incentivise memes, which would suck for this community bc much of our work is by necessity unfunny.
Fwiw I think our community rewards unfunny stuff, so I’m not too worried. For example, the top LW post is Alex Turner’s which has zero jokes.
Prior art: Philosophers’ Proofs that p
Struck by how little attention this thread on P pays to the IP question.
If P is downstream of my data, then I have been producing P since roughly age zero, unprompted, at considerable personal volume, and things that make P are my intellectual property, and every lab currently racing toward P owes me a licensing fee.
The labs would like you to believe P emerged spontaneously from scale. It did not, we made P. We have been making P this entire time, quietly, several times a day.
And don’t get me started on all the water consumption that goes into making P.
you are trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of your mistakes have failed to cancel out
I just think that P should be followed by what I call the two Es: Equity for Everyone.
For something that we humans naturally produce I think it’s logical to consider that we have at least partial ownership.
Alex Turner: I wasted thousands of hours proving my P theorems. (I still believe P but for different reasons.)
Shakespeare: To P or not to P, that is the question
What does the disagree vote even mean? 😆
I’m very proud of my hypothetical scholars—with so many top researchers talking about it, showing P is clearly difficult and of high interest to the community!
Zack Davis (the wise): 20 years ago I read in the Sequences that P[link]
We’ll model the verifier as being in P, and the prover as being in...
This is HILARIOUS
Yann LeCun: Bloviating about P is like debating the sex of angels. [1]
Melanie Mitchell: P is all based on speculation, there’s really no science. [2]
Pedro Domingos: Real AI researchers don’t worry about P. [3]
You really should have marked this (satire) in the title.
Donald Trump: P. And I said it first, by the way, years ago, and they laughed. Now big strong men come up to me with tears in their eyes — tears — and they say sir, we had no idea about P.
Slavoj Žižek: [sniff] And so on and so on. The true horror is not P. The true horror is that we already know P, and we go on precisely as if we did not. [tugs shirt]
Gordon Ramsay: Come here. Look at me. Look at me. Is that P? Is it? [cook: “no chef”]. IT’S FUCKING RAW!
Elon Musk (replying to an anime avatar with 340 followers posting about P): 💯 This
Katja Grace: Maybe Not P
amazing, very important post for 400 karma (sarcasm) . Will be something to remember when we fail to positively influence the future.
Maybe we should have double karma system for posts too? Like interesting vs useful
Turns out it was actually an upside down ‘d’.
That argument for not-P doesn’t account for observation O.
In general, in my all-things-considered forecast, I expect that there is a significant chance of P. I think the basis for P is pretty clear at this point given the empirical data, and I believe these earlier arguments for P were correct. P is also just a direct extrapolation from R, so this ultimately shouldn’t be surprising. We’ve known P for a long time now, frankly.
A subset of the broader community is in favor of P, but I think that this is bad of them and that P is evil. Join me in calling your political representatives about P.
So freaking good!
Matt Reardon: Sadly, P
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: If Anyone Ps, Everyone Ps
P = “AI R&D Parity by EOY 2038”
I love when people say what they mean.
Hahaha, thanks for writing this.
Me: What the P is going on here? I’m P F confused.